Retailers

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT RETAILERS - PAGE 2

NEW DELHI: Retailers are in dire straits. After Reliance Retail, Future Group (Big Bazaar), & Subhiksha, it's now the turn of Radhakrishna Group's Foodland Fresh and Wadhawan Group's Spinach to feel the heat of ongoing market volatility. Industry sources told SundayET that while Foodland Fresh, the neighbourhood convenience store of the Rs 500 crore RK Group, has closed down several stores in the last few months, Spinach, an easy-to-shop-in local store, owned by the Delhi-based Wadhawan Group, is also contemplating putting their expansion plans on hold for the time being.

NEW DELHI: Retailers are in dire straits. After Reliance Retail, Future Group (Big Bazaar), & Subhiksha, it's now the turn of Radhakrishna Group's Foodland Fresh and Wadhawan Group's Spinach to feel the heat of ongoing market volatility. Industry sources told SundayET that while Foodland Fresh, the neighbourhood convenience store of the Rs 500 crore RK Group, has closed down several stores in the last few months, Spinach, an easy-to-shop-in local store, owned by the Delhi-based Wadhawan Group, is also contemplating putting their expansion plans on hold for the time being.

Newbie shoppers entering a Food Lion in Mooresville, North Carolina, might think they've come to the wrong place. The shop looks more like an electronics emporium than a traditional grocery store. Customers bustle about brandishing handheld scanners. Information kiosks dish out maps on how to find any item, such as that lattice pie crust hiding between aisles 7 and 8. And near the pharmacy, a high-tech blood-pressure monitor takes shoppers' readings and keeps the data for a year.

From a quarterly basis, the brass of Reliance Retail, led by Mukesh Ambani's lieutenant Manoj Modi, now assembles for review meetings on a monthly basis. The frequency of meetings might have changed, the modesty hasn't: the presentations still make no mention of how competitors are faring. Judging by what Reliance Retail did in the last quarter, the numbers for which it announced on January 17, and what others retailers did, it need not have. For now at least. The retail landscape in India is strewn with the remains of expansions gone awry (Future Group)

NEW DELHI: Hit by high rentals and low footfalls, one-third of retailers at shopping malls in large cities like Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata are shifting to tier-II & III cities, according to an Assocham survey . The survey found that around 300 to 350 malls came up in the country over the last two years. However, a staggering 75 to 80 per cent of these malls lie vacant, even as 95 malls were forced to shut down . Retailer tenants at malls are switching over to smaller cities like Nagpur, Jaipur, Pune, Indore, Lucknow, Ludhiana and Chandigarh, as they promise better returns, the survey pointed out. "The core benefits for the retailer tenants to move to smaller cities are lower operational costs and comparatively lesser competition," Assocham President Rana Kapoor said.

NEW DELHI: Rajmah prices traded higher by Rs 50 per quintal in an otherwise steady wholesale pulses market today on retailers demand. However, other pulses moved in a narrow range in limited deals and settled around previous levels. Traders said demand from retailers mainly led to rise in rajmah prices. In the national capital, rajmah chitra moved up by Rs 50 to Rs 8,300-9,500 per quintal.

The past two decades have seen relentless growth of global retailing. Carrefour and Metro operate in more than 25 countries, while Aldi, Auchan, Tesco, and Wal-Mart operate in more than 10 countries. It has led to a remarkable power shift from suppliers to retailers. Historically, power in distribution channels has rested with brand marketers like Nestle and Unilever. In contrast to these multinational suppliers, retailers were local and fragmented. Retailing was dominated by the owner-operated sector, romantically referred to as "mom and pops.

NEW DELHI: Mumbai's drug retailers and stockists have ended their boycott of the products of Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG and its subsidiary Sandoz, with the companies agreeing to end the practice of selling some of their high-value medicines directly to consumers from June 1. Over 7,000 retailers and stockists had stopped selling all the 198 medicines of two firms from April 1, protesting the drugmakers' practice of direct selling of...

MUMBAI: Retailers are leaving no stones unturned to keep their sales counters ticking amid the economic slump. They are offering attractive deals at margin costs, although the prices of their procurements such as sugar and rice have moved up by nearly 10% in the past two months. Some large retailers are also rightsizing their inventories to suit customer preferences. The food retailing arm of the Future Group, Food Bazaar, is keeping its operations simple and trimming inventories.

Sure, shopping patterns in India are very different from those in the US, but the issues retailers face are almost identical. They are all worried about inventory; they want to supply what the customer wants at the least cost and yet make the maximum profit; they want to employ as few people as possible at the store but still serve the customer well. It's this universal business problem of retailers that StorePerform, a software product now being developed in India, is trying to address.